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Monthly Archives: April 2012

Yesterday I was sat in a restaurant having dinner with my family, some of whom had come to visit over the Easter weekend. My niece who will turn 5 years old in July had seen my iPhone and wanted to play with it, so I handed it over to her, with no comprehension of what was to come next. I must point out here that my sister in law informs me that my niece had never held an iPhone before.

Now, I don’t know how much she had seen of me using the device, however I was pretty much blown away by how at ease she was with using the iPhone. On taking the iPhone into her hands she instantly pressed the home button and swiped her finger across “slide to unlock” – of course I had to tell her which numbers to enter.

On entering the home screen she knew instantly to start tapping on the various buttons to open up the various applications. I watched her open up Safari, tap on the URL window and start tapping on various letters on the keyboard. Now, of course the URL entered was simply a string of random letters, however, the main point I am highlighting here is how intuitive Apple’s UI design is. She even somehow knew how to exit Safari by pressing the home button.

Next I watched her slide her finger down the screen to display the notification centre, then slide her finger back up to reveal the home screen again, and at one point when the screen had dimmed just before going to autolock she tapped on the screen to bring back full brightness.

I also watched her go into the Amazon app which scared me as I wondered what items she was going to order – of course I don’t expect that she knows my username/password.

I appreciate that my niece could simply have been tapping on random buttons and UI elements, however one cannot deny the fact that even with this she worked out:
~ “slide to unlock”
~ pressing the home button to exit an application
~ how to dismiss the notification centre…
all go toward an argument that the UI designers at Apple know there “stuff” very well indeed.